The Campaign Builder's Guild

cosmology
MATTHEO made all the worlds according to the marvellous design, and she is not sure if that design is hers or comes from a yet more insidious place. Her daughter MOON took a strand of that creation, imperceptible among the vastness of things, and chained it to her own bosom, thus birthing the swollen and dreary god called GREAT WEIGHT (who depends from the shackle's end and mutters lamely upward) and the two endlessly twining dragons who are the chains along which she hangs her planets.

the chain
PRAXIS is the eastern dragon, whose head is hidden in the misty gehenna of GREAT WEIGHT. The gigas were born on its thorny skin from the rust of stellar rains and out of their own madness the elder gigas summoned RUST, the gigas-god and the god of all rust. Sometimes RUST falls in fine showers upon GREAT WEIGHT and irritates him into violent motion.

an end to things
ISSR is our world's name but the world prince calls it after himself. It is first in the chain and the western dragon (who is called CERES) has the planet's rim snatched up in his jagged jaws. The gigas have travelled along both dragons across all the shackled worlds, even as far as here, following the elder gigas called JARAMBA. With them they have brought their god, RUST, who would be the freedom of all worlds and the death of CERES and PRAXIS. RUST is loved and hated above all things.

tears of world-keepers
FROLIXO is called the prince of ISSR and his face is carved into the CRYING MOUNTAIN where it weeps above the billion other faces that are there. Above even he are the eight who have no names and their faces are not whole for when JARAMBA carved them the world prince struck their stone apart. The ocean gushes through their hollow heads and thus they are called the AGGRIEVED.

[ooc]This is D&D stuff using alternate core classes and feat rules. The setting preluded here governs levels 1-5. By Level six the PCs should have sorted Frolixo out and decided what they want to do about Moon and the Dragons and such, and be on their way to the greater cosmos.

EDIT: there are now only two dragons and all the worlds are bound between them as they spin through the universe.[/ooc]

I would play this five times.

geographies
ISSR and all the other planets shackled before gracious, graceless MOON are flat and double-sided like coins. The twin dragons stand at the west and east of every planet and caress those worlds with gravelled gemstone bellies that are broader than any isthmus, spinning together in refractive double helix and lighting the night with wondrous auroras. As they make their first twining in their passage toward farther worlds, CERES and PRAXIS seem to cross paths before altogether fading from visibility. This crossing is called the ARCH OF HEAVEN.

The oceans of any world extend from one face to the other and full-bodied ships can be sailed through that heavy darkness to the planet's counter-side. Often the monarchs of the oceans, knowing full well the value of such short passage, demand strange or impossible tithes of seafarers. The seas ebb and swell unaccountably, driving their own masters mad.

All worlds must have a star to think and to grow by. Thus MOON stole a starchild from its airy cradle to provide her jewels with light. In time this star has grown into a sun, but he is diminished before the greatness of his task. He calls himself SEVERANCE. He has become cruel for want of his home and his kind.

MATTHEO had very different dreams for the children of her many worlds but those fates became tangled in MOON's greed and madness so that no one could say who should have been where, nor discern their own world's natural future.

NMO
feather fall
They will tell you that their people were kin to birds until a vindictive god took that gift away. They do have the semblance of birds, with clapping beaks and agile dagger tongues, and by a curious magic they do not fall as others fall so that they have no fear of heights. But their time of flight is not written in any history. Perhaps that memory was wiped away '" other peoples have been reduced in this way. Perhaps the nmo were always as they are.

GIGAS
message
prestidigitation
Gigas are born in the shadow of thorny mountains amid glowing lakes and clouds of gathering rust. In drinking the venomed water and breathing RUST into their lungs the gigas grow strange with the stars' own dreams. They are fuelled by that strangeness and require only weeds and moss to eat; thus their height is frail like an over-tall tree. They are coloured like fresh dark earth and smell like fresh spilt blood and they have wide frowning mouths. They only ever whisper, but they are always heard.

TURLAINS
light (self only)
dancing lights
There is a way of mirroring the lights of heaven so that their images imprint upon the world and are made somewhat real. Such creations are not stars. They bring no dreams and they give (and take) no life. But they are all that stars seem to be in the simplicity of mortal sight. When DURGLI-IN-THE-TREES, the great magician of elder times, first succeeded in this feat, the newborn glimmerings blinded him out of spite, for they knew (and will forever know) the hollowness of their being. Because DURGLI was of the nmo the turlains echo his familiar shape, but their feathers are very long and always, always black. Their massive eyes have nothing in them but this is not why they are feared.

HUMANS
pass without a trace
mending
Behind this race is a second race that is glimpsed only faintly and wears the former like a mask. When the Hidden people wish anything done it is the Seen that do it, and the Hidden have great palaces where the Seen are only servants. There are banquets laid and gardens kept and music is played through the days and nights to please them. Other races speculate that these Hidden must be the gods of humans but this is not so. The Hidden are only the hated siblings of the Seen and wherever there are human beings there is enmity that can in no way be dispelled.